Halloween

On the edge of the village, beneath the gravid leaves of a tortured willow, I gather with my sisters, Geneve Flynn, Angela Yuriko Smith, and Christina Sng, on the eve of Halloween. When the village is quiet, its inhabitants slumbering in their beds, I stoke our campfire with a stick, stirring up sparks in the darkness. “Shall we begin?” I whisper. My sisters nod, shuffling closer to the fire. “I have a ghost story to tell you,” Angela says. “I was about 12 years old, and my family was moving from Cheyenne, Wyoming to Bethesda, Maryland. As all this moving…

The first house I ever owned was haunted. I don’t say this to be dramatic; it’s simple truth. It was a brick “trinity-style” town home in Center City Philadelphia that was built in 1832. It still had its original floorboards and windows, there was a fireplace in every room, and the spot where the old outhouse used to be caved in while we lived there. Many people died in that house. And the ghosts who remained had an affinity for classical music. It was 2004 when we moved in. We were planning our wedding, and I had purchased a CD…

It was 1978—Friday, October 13th to be precise—when I was finally old enough to stay home alone while my parents went out to dinner and a movie. Or more likely, while they went disco dancing with my aunt and uncle who lived next door. You see, the four had been practicing their grooviest dance moves in the basement every Wednesday for months, the beat of “Night Fever” or “Jive Talkin’” barely stifled by the closed door. This would also be accompanied by the sound of poorly executed dance steps scuffing awkwardly across the unfinished cement floor. (I once made the…

My father brought in the victims, two at a time, extra large and heavy. Pumpkins. Soon-to-be jack-o’-lanterns. He was an encyclopedia editor, a quiet man who worked tediously at his desk, books stacked around him in fortress walls, a green banker’s lamp pooling light. He was equally methodical and tedious when carving pumpkins. He worked slowly, laboriously, hands careful, eyes focused behind his bifocals. He penciled faces on the pumpkins, used a ruler to make the isosceles triangle eyes and nose and the teeth, too, of course. When he took up the large carving knife, the same one used to…

I lead children into houses of horror. I advise them against touching monkeys’ paws. But I urge them to listen to heartbeats thump-thump-thumping beneath the floor. I’ve taught middle school students for sixteen years now, and I love diving into tales of the macabre with them. From what I can tell, they also enjoy our treks into darkness. Eighth-graders seem eager to consume the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, in particular. Kids nowhere near old enough to imbibe Amontillado drink in the dread that’s developing inside Poe’s musty Italian catacombs. Heck, a malformed vulture’s eye is probably sometimes more palatable…

When I was a kid, my mom always went with us trick or treating and only to our friends’ and family’s home. Why? Because who knows what evils could be lurking within the chocolate of a fun size snickers bar and because the lines at the ER where the police set up free candy X-rays were massive time suckers at the end of a rather exhausting evening. I always imagined some nefarious witch or creepy old man sneaking razorblades and pins into candy bars. Sitting at their workshop bench, wearing a watchmaker’s loupe so after embedding the torture device and…

Long before my Lily Wong thrillers hit the bookstores, I was possessed by a dark tale of Brazilian magic. An immortal trickster, a California artist plagued by voices, a mixed-race beauty cast out from her family, and Serafina Olegario, a desperate mother who rises from the slums of Brazil to become a fearsome Quimbanda priestess. Their forty-year saga, across three continents and a past incident in 1560 France, channeled through my mind and fingers into a screenplay and many evolutions of a novel before it finally found a home. Serafina lured me into the darkness, bound me with supernatural, psychological,…

Suburbs are hell. This said by someone who grew up on cul-de-sacs, down streets named after Ivy League universities, on parcels of farmland carved up into intentionally bland, vaguely descriptive development names, on land that was almost certainly stolen from the original inhabitants, then re-distributed and tamed. Or attempted to be tamed Planned idyllic lifestyles, conformity to the nth degree. All in the name of safety, if not community. All in the name of keeping the kids corralled and controlled, even if most of us keep them indoors and on screens these days. A classic example of a good idea…

There is a cliché specific to writing we’ve all heard; write what you know. How does a writer of horror, know? Horror research can take the writer, as investigator, down some extremely disturbing rabbit holes of discovery. I hope it goes without saying, writers of hideous crimes and murders, obviously don’t commit the crimes to document the details and horror of torturing and ending lives. Horror authors have produced classic tales of mayhem, and it would be ludicrous to think one would need to build a Poe inspired dungeon, cleave some poor soul in-half under the blade of a swinging…

She had never been fond of Halloween, my poor dear, and as the season approached she used to get thinner and thinner, bluer, much more translucent, her fair skin producing an effect of iridescence, as if she were turning into an ultraviolet bulb, and some would say that it was just because things get busier in the Fall, and she was busier, anyway, she had many more visitors because October is the right time to see the mummy and its light breathing and to get a scare of two if it happens that it opens its eyes, it would look…

Hope sprang eternal for my father, because every autumn, he’d take my siblings and I to our area’s haunted houses. Designed to raise money for charity and peopled by local talent, including many kids, these weren’t what one could call high theatre, nor were the scares elevated affairs. However, since I was a child with a far-too-active imagination, I conjured all sorts of terrors. There were the obligatory witches who feasted on the flesh of children. Headless Hessians mounted Nightmares. Mummies dragged bandaged legs to enact ages-old curses. Creatures, monsters, ghosts, and Dracula. Hammer-style bloodbaths and immortal killers intent on…

One of my earliest memories of spending time with my mom was also my first ever haunted house. I was probably the youngest person in line, but I was over the moon to venture out with my mom and her friends to prove I was fearless. I had made it all the way through the line, even with some very animated characters, creepy light effects and bloodcurdling screams coming from within the house looming in front of us. We were finally at the front, ready to enter the scary haunted house. It didn’t take long until I was absolutely in…

...I might yet fall victim to a future Friday the 13th.   One night, long ago (the early '00s), in a place not so far away (Erie and Edinboro, Pennsylvania)... My late best friend, may he rest in peace, once shared with our little college group a wicked cool tree. This huge, gnarled specimen of unknown species invaded the ground with dark, barky tendrils; from its colossal bole-torso reached giant, twisted limb-branches; in the fall, these bare branches extended into thin, insidious offshoots ending in skeletal wood-fingers and bark-nails. All 'round this Witch Tree, as it was dubbed, lay the…

What if I could become the monster of a horror film? Perhaps a lot of kids growing up in the 1980s fantasized about the question; many youngsters must have pondered the idea in their make believe realms. But for me the question contained more potency. More potential. Because I knew such a monster lurked under the surface of my being. Caged. Waiting to erupt. Wanting to scare everyone around me. I knew such a revelation would thrill and empower me. The notion first hit at a young age, before I recognized the beast within. Something attracted me to the Wicked…

Maybe I love Halloween because I was named after a dead kid. Maybe my fascination with horror comes from the same root. I think about these things between July and October. Where I’m from in Ohio, summer football practice and Halloween are just plain linked in one big thing we call Fall. This year I’m thinking about those links in a new way, and the links to why we write what we do. Years in, do we know all of our influences? Do we want to? It’s all thanks to a story Dad told me this summer, if not for…

"We find delight in the most loathsome things" -   Charles Baudelaire 'Tis the season for all things that howl, bite and go bump in the night. Grab a pumpkin spice Latte and pull up your reading chair.   Here are a few fun, dark and tasty treats to help you get in the mood for the real most wonderful time of the year. Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne probably already evokes terror in you - just not in the right way. You probably break into a sweat remembering being trapped dissecting The Scarlet Letter in your high school English…

There’s a snapshot of me when I was 10, sitting on a boulder outside of Grand Teton National Park. The picture was taken from the passenger window of our family’s pickup, parked in a long line of trucks with campers on the back, waiting for the day’s campsites to be released. I sat under a pine tree with a hardcover library book open on my lap, irritated to have been distracted from my reading. I was in the midst of discovering Dracula. I’d grown up watching Sir Graves Ghastly on TV on Saturday afternoons. Sir Graves hosted an endless series…

Ghost stories go together with Halloween like “trick” and “treat.” The image of the sheet with eye-holes is as much a staple of the season as pumpkins, bats, and skulls. When horror films invariably possess the airwaves, they usually feature menacing, spirted icons like Candyman and Sadako/Samara. Ghosts typically figure in novels and movies as such supernatural villains, from the vengeful phantom seeking to perpetuate destruction (Kayako Saeki of The Grudge) to the restless wraith demanding closure (Joseph Carmichael of The Changeling). In true-life anecdotes, the role of the ghost is less clear-cut. For one thing, the spirit's identity is…

For some it’s such a strange concept, working in a haunted house where the general populace relates to it as something truly horrific and exciting, something you go to during the haunting season of October to get entertained, where you go with friends and family, walking through narrow hallways and stooped corridors, experiencing strange music and sounds, and then, sprung upon by the freaks lingering in the darkness...that’s where the work comes into play (aside from other things). And I am proud to say I work at one of the best Haunted Houses in South Florida, Enigma Haunt. Being a…

Future relatives are the worse of the bunch when it comes to what terrifies the small and the weak, but just around that corner, a big wheel begins turning, and like Danny in The Shining, that kid spinning those “Big Wheels” comes out on top of the terror. In the 1970’s, blood, clowns, rock stars that painted their faces like evil clowns that spit blood, begat kids roaming the streets being these things on Halloween, and their terror did beget more terror, more blood, more screaming into a mic, but that reaction to something darker isn’t what you’d think. I…